We use narrative analysis to study a recent, pivotal period
in the governance of taxation in the UK. Our contribution
is to show how a Formalist approach to narrative
(explained in depth below) helps us understand personal
projects of sense making in a context that is technically,
legally and morally complex. In doing so, we provocatively
advocate thinking about what ordinarily could be called
‘real world’ narratives about the governance of taxation
(‘tax tales’) as folk tales. This leads to novel insights because
by invoking the structure of the folktale we move beyond
considering the content of a narrative, the ‘story’, to
reflecting on how that content is organised, the ‘plot’ (a
distinction that can be traced as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics
and Rhetoric; Morrell, 2012). This approach concentrates
attention not simply on the component parts of a
narrative, such as the events that are related, but on the
relationship of these components to one another and on
their role within the narrative as a whole.